Scolding by the Public Editor

When I was a newspaper reporter, I had nightmares that something like this would come out of one of my articles.

From the NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt:

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan: "Poor Cronkite"